Tag: Students

A COLLEGE GROUP FOR TRUMP TO BOND WITH: RAPISTS

If you are a male college student accused of sexual assault, your good bro, Donald Trump, has your back. Yes, this administration seems to have finally found itself a friendly constituency in academia. For those poor partying frat boys, forced to parse the word “consent” in the middle of an all-night kegger, help is on the way.

Remember how President Obama took on the issue of campus rape? Disgusted to learn that one in five female college students had been sexually assaulted, the former president made the subject a keystone of his domestic agenda. He ordered the Department of Education to launch investigations into the way schools were dealing with the problem. Under threat of losing federal funds, those institutions became far more aggressive in handling sexual assault complaints. All that is about to change.

Enter Trump’s Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos and her recently appointed leader of the department’s Office for Civil Rights, Candice Jackson. They are on a mission to roll back many of the Obama era policies designed to make campuses safer for female students. The duo spent time last week hearing from alleged sexual assault perpetrators, who insisted they did absolutely nothing to justify their expulsion. DeVos and Jackson also met with representatives of a white male advocacy group called the National Coalition For Men. The NCFM believes there is a huge problem of women lying about being raped by men.

Although Jackson, head of the Education Department’s civil rights office, is herself a rape survivor, the men’s rights lobby couldn’t have found a more kindred spirit. During the 2016 presidential campaign, Jackson dismissed the complaints of more than a dozen women accusing Trump of sexual assault or unwanted advances, calling them “fake victims”. She was equally dismissive of rape complaints from women college students, saying that “90% (of the accusations) fall into the category of ‘we were both drunk,’ ‘we broke up and six months later. . .she just decided that our last sleeping together was not quite right.’”

DeVos agrees with Jackson that the pendulum has swung way too far in favor of the accusers. They want to reverse course. The Education Department has jurisdiction because Title IX of the Civil Rights Act prohibits sex discrimination at any school receiving federal funds. Under the Obama administration, the department issued 19 pages of guidelines for colleges to use in investigating sexual assault and harassment charges. It also warned the schools that their failure to comply could result in a loss of federal funding. Under the Obama guidelines, schools were urged to use a “preponderance of the evidence” test in adjudicating sexual misconduct complaints. It’s the same standard of proof used in most civil litigation. Basically, it means the party with the strongest evidence prevails.

The men’s rights advocates, however, insist that students should never be expelled and have their lives ruined by what they regard as a low standard of proof. Their solution is for colleges to turn sexual assault complaints over to the criminal justice system and take no independent action. It’s an absurd suggestion. First of all, this is not an either-or situation. A student who is raped can – and should – file complaints with both the school and the police. They are separate systems, with different interests and outcomes. To get a rape conviction in court, the state needs to prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt. Such a high standard of proof is justified on the basis that the government is seeking to take the defendant’s liberty away. It’s a different story when it comes to colleges and universities trying to maintain a safe learning environment. Schools routinely expel students if the weight – or “preponderance” – of the evidence shows they committed, say, plagiarism. Do we really want to treat sexual assault as a less egregious campus offense than copying a term paper from Wikipedia?

The ugly truth here is that a rape culture reigns supreme on many campuses, fostering the unfortunate belief that sex-while-intoxicated inherently implies consent. It does not. But many prosecutors shy away from taking such cases before a jury. A he-said-she-said prosecution, laced with an alcoholic haze, is often a tough sell for a jury. All the more reason for colleges to expel students when the weight of the evidence – a bar lower than that of a criminal court – shows that they engaged in inappropriate sexual conduct. Otherwise, a decision not to prosecute means the accused attacker remains on campus.

We have always used dual tracks in dealing with actions that may violate the rules of a workplace or university, as well as the law. And the levels of proof have always been different. We have this unalienable right to liberty, and it can be taken away only upon the highest standard of proof. The right to hold a job or attend a specific school is not so unalienable, and while nobody should be fired or expelled without proof of wrongdoing, the test for that proof is not necessarily the same as that used in a criminal court. A student caught selling drugs on campus, or stealing equipment from the biology lab, is likely to be kicked out of school, regardless of whatever criminal action may be taken. Sexual assault should be treated no differently.

Yet, the men’s rights lobby is pushing a seemingly receptive Trump administration to tell colleges to take no disciplinary action for sexual misconduct until, and unless, there has been a criminal conviction. That might play well for Trump’s base of supposedly forgotten, angry and trod-upon white men. It is nothing short of a nightmare for any student looking for a safe place to learn.

SHIELDING STUDENTS FROM EVIL WON’T HELP THEM ALLEVIATE IT

College campuses, once a hotbed of anything-goes radicalism, are morphing into antiseptic bastions of thought cleansing. The source of this depressing trend is a new breed of students, determined to avoid offense or emotional discomfort at any cost.

Harvard Law School students, according to The New Yorker, have asked their professors not to teach about rape law because the subject is traumatic for them. Northwestern University students filed federal charges, eventually dismissed, against their instructor for writing a professional journal opinion piece opposing prohibitions against faculty-student dating. They said it made them uncomfortable. Students in a number of colleges have been allowed to skip reading assignments that contain passages that might upset them. Here’s how Atlantic Monthly introduced a lengthy analysis of this trend: “Something strange is happening at America’s colleges and universities.”

Indeed it is. The movement’s origins were benign and well intentioned. It started with infrequently used “trigger warnings” on assigned readings, designed as a heads’ up for students who had experienced trauma – sexual assault or other violence. They weren’t excused from the assignment, but the advance warning allowed them to consult with a therapist or take other precautions. In those same early days, human rights training for both faculty and students focused on a concept of “microaggressions”, a form of subconscious racism or sexism typically involving a stereotype. An example would be telling Asian students they must be good at math.

Those noble and sensible beginnings, however, evolved into darker outcomes. As a result of student pressure, backed by threatened social media attacks and the filing of federal discrimination charges, trigger warnings expanded way beyond the traumatized few and are now issued by more than 50% of the faculty, and for such subjects as racism, classism sexism, disregard for personal autonomy, spiders, drug use, suicide, indigenous artifacts, Nazi paraphernalia and slimy things. Worse yet, many schools report that a trigger warning now means students don’t have to read the objectionable material. Fortunately, leaders of some of the country’s leading educational institutions have recently tried to dial this movement back. American University, the University of Chicago and others have adopted policies against trigger warnings. Meanwhile, microaggressions have gone from a human rights learning strategy to a list of things that should never be said. In the University of California system, for example, the faculty has been warned against using a long list phrases, including, “I believe the most qualified person should get the job.”

Sheltering students from unpleasant thoughts and offensive ideas is anathema to what education is all about. How do you teach history without exploring the horrible trauma of war, slavery, Jim Crow laws and the treatment of American Indians? How do you teach literature if you have to trigger out Shakespeare’s “Othello” because of its violence against women, or his “Henry V” because of Henry’s use of warfare and threatened sexual violence as a way of obtaining political success? What about the suicide themes of Sylvia Plath’s poetry or the fear, pain and suffering caused by totalitarianism in Kurt Vonnegut’s novels? If the goal of education is to teach students not what to think, but how to think, you don’t get there by allowing them to remain in their comfort zones.

Trying to shelter students from racist and sexist microaggressions may alleviate momentary angst, but it does nothing to eradicate the broader problem that produced them. When they surface, why not use them as teachable moments so the entire class can learn what stereotyping is and the pain it causes? It is sadly ironic that this push to create a sanitized, safe and protective campus environment is happening at a time when this country is 30-some days and a handful of poll points away from electing as president someone whose campaign has been filled not with microaggressions, but with “YUGE” macroaggressions. Here is a small sampling of the headlines: (TRIGGER WARNING: These news reports are likely to cause anxiety, depression and a sudden interest in Canadian real estate.)

Donald Trump Eats a Taco Bowl to Prove His Love for Hispanics
Trump Campaign CEO Complained of Jews at Daughters’ School
Donald Trump: If Black Lives Don’t Matter, Then Go Back to Africa
Trump Calls for Banning Muslims From Entering U.S.
Trump Wanted to Fire Women Who Weren’t Pretty Enough

That’s the world outside of the campus cocoon. The Donald Trumps out there do not come with a trigger warning. Dealing with them, resisting their vile hate and racism is not optional. That’s why we need college graduates who are ready, willing and able to work against the forces they’d rather not think about. It’s the only way we can move this evil trauma from the headlines to the history books.

COLLEGES CALL IN THE DOGS TO SAVE THE STUDENTS

Just in case you haven’t visited a college campus recently, these are not exactly the easy, lazy, hazy days of higher education. Student anxiety and depression are off the charts. Suicide prevention is a major concern. The long and winding road to pomp and circumstance is paved with stress and tension. And for good reason. A gloomy and uncertain job future has mortgaged-out parents pushing their kids away from liberal arts to science, technology or engineering, regardless of their offspring’s aptitude or interest. As a result, 2016 graduates left campus with an average debt of $37,172, many with a major foisted upon them, and no immediate job prospects.

Relief, however, is in sight. The chieftains of academia put their heads together, probably in multiple conference rooms lined with white boards and coffee urns, to take up the urgent matter of student stress. What to do? What to do? With $1.3 trillion in student debt and climbing, helicopter parents buzzing overhead and a student body stressed to the max, these administrators brainstormed this dilemma with their collective PhD wisdom and came up with a solution: animals.

That’s right. America’s universities and colleges are going to the dogs – and cats, snakes, chinchillas, pigs and small horses – but in a good way. Rather than fix the underlying causes of student stress, like tuition cost and the job market – administrators turned to the animal kingdom as a source of relief. Pet therapy programs, long used by hospitals and nursing homes, have a solid track record in reducing blood pressure, anxiety and depression. And compared with drugs, major medical interventions or eliminating the source of the angst, animals come pretty cheap. That’s how they quickly rose to the top of the white boards.

Yale Law students can check out Monty, a border terrier mix, from the school library for 30 minutes a crack. The University of Connecticut brings cats and dogs in for stress reduction during finals week and to help students cope with their classmates’ suicides. Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia has “puppy rooms” staffed by trained therapy dogs to help stressed out students relax. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in Troy, New York allows students to have their own therapy animals live with them on campus. That makes a variety of dog breeds, along with a menagerie of ponies, snakes and chinchillas, etc. permanent fixtures on the RPI campus.

The trend began with a small number of pets brought in occasionally by nonprofit groups to help with campus stress. It quickly morphed into the RPI approach of allowing students to bring their own pets. As a result of litigation under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and Federal Housing Authority regulations, schools receiving federal funds cannot stop students from bringing their therapy animals with them for the entire college ride. These “service animals” do not necessarily need certification, but schools may request a doctor’s letter drawing a nexus between a specific physical or emotional condition and the pet selected to mitigate it.

The University of California at Berkley, birthplace of the 1960s’ free speech movement, has evolved into a virtual Noah’s Ark, with residence halls filled with rabbits, kangaroo rats, pot-bellied pigs, cockatiels, ferrets, ball pythons, Cuban rock iguanas and Chilean rose hair tarantulas, all appropriately leashed, caged and/or vaccinated. Administrators there say they err on the side of letting animals in as a way of helping students cope and keeping litigation costs at a minimum.

All of this is, in a way, kind of sweet and refreshing. Who can object to letting overanxious college kids get some moments of peace and calm from the pet of their choice? Besides PETA, that is. I suspect it is only a matter of time before we hear from the animal rights activists about subjecting dogs, cats, pigs, et al, to the ravages of undergraduate dorm life. Still, in a more perfect world, we would find a way to reduce or eliminate student costs and the helicoptering parents they produce. That way students could enjoy learning on their own with minimum tension, and the animals could return to their own stress-free habitat. Unfortunately, we aren’t there yet. So cue the therapy iguana. Midterms are coming.

NO RELIGIOUS LIBERTY FOR A HUNGRY CHILD

There was an amazing piece of news out of western Pennsylvania this week. You may have missed it because it happened the same day Angelina and Brad told us it was over; we process grief at different speeds. To fill you in: a school cafeteria worker quit her job when she had to deny a young boy a hot lunch because of a balance due on his account.

As reported by the Washington Post, Stacy Koltiska said she was working the cafeteria register at Wylandville Elementary School in the unincorporated town of Eighty Four, about 25 miles southwest of Pittsburgh. She said she will never forget the little boy’s eyes as he stood there with a tray of hot food. Due to a new school policy, the lunchroom staff is prohibited from giving hot lunches to anyone whose parents owed $25 of more for past meals. Because of the balance owed, Koltiska was duty bound by her work rules to deny him the hot lunch.

Under the policy, the parents will be charged $2.05 for their son’s meal, the one that Koltiska had to dump into the garbage. In lieu of hot food, the debtors’ child was handed a cold sandwich consisting of two slices of wheat bread and a single piece of what Koltiska called “government cheese.” So she quit, right then and there. She told the Post that her religious faith does not allow her to deny a hot meal to a hungry child. “As a Christian, I have an issue with this,” she explained. “It’s sinful and shameful is what it is.” She said she resigned out of a moral obligation. “God is love, and we should love one another and be kind,” Koltiska said. “There’s enough wealth in this world that no child should go hungry, especially in school. To me this is just wrong.”

Shockingly, there has been radio silence over Koltiska’s plight on the part of the evangelical right and its “religious liberty movement”. I fully expected Kim Davis to show up with a picket sign. She’s the clerk of court in Rowan County Kentucky who refused to issue marriage licenses to gay couples because her religious beliefs outranked the law, or so she said. Davis did a few days in jail while relishing the martyr role and the army of Republican politicians who scrambled to her side for a photo op. This was the seminal event in a nation-wide push for legislation establishing the right to discriminate against the LGBT community on the basis of religious belief.

The argument is that people who sincerely hold religious convictions should get a pass whenever there is a conflict between the law and their faith. This has resulted in the passage of legislation in some states allowing florists, caterers and others to refuse to provide services for a gay wedding based on a religious opposition to same sex marriage. It also produced the Supreme Court decision in “Hobby Lobby”, where the justices said a business owner with a theological objection to birth control is free to remove contraception coverage from the company medical plan.

So why aren’t the religious liberty zealots expressing outrage over the school lunch dilemma? Granted, taking hot food away from a hungry child has nothing to do with birth control or the anti-gay agenda, but the religious principle could not be more directly applicable. Kim Davis became an overnight folk hero in some quarters when, as an elected official, she refused to issue gay couples the marriage licenses they were legally entitled to. Poor Stacy Koltiska, following a school board rule she abhorred, dumped the little boy’s lunch into the garbage, handed him a pathetic cheese sandwich and quit her job. Two women; the same God; two different conflicts between their faith and the law. One of them followed the law she disagreed with and then walked away, never to deny another child a hot meal. The other never followed the law, kept her job and went on a speaking tour with a hostile rant about “religious liberty”. Which of them went to a better place is unknown to all but God. But it’s a pretty easy guess.

THE JOE PATERNO STORY: DON’T LET FACTS MAR THE LEGEND IN OUR MIND

Joe Paterno, depending on your perspective, was either God’s gift to college football or a pathetic pedophile enabler. The continuum between those two extremes runs the length of a football field. And there is nobody at the 50-yard line; you either revere JoePa or you despise him. Although he has been dead for nearly five years, when it comes to a posthumous life, this guy has been more active than Elvis.

This past Saturday, for example, there was a celebration in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of Paterno’s first game as Penn State University’s head football coach. During that time span, he won a gazillion games and became a beloved legend and prolific rainmaker for the Big Ten school in State College, Pennsylvania. Then, in 2011, his halo took on a sudden tarnish when his longtime assistant, Jerry Sandusky turned out to be a serial child molester. Many of the sexual assaults occurred in the university’s athletic facilities. Although Paterno denied any knowledge of his assistant’s crimes, an investigation by former FBI director Louis French found that he had likely known about the pedophilia and did not report it. Just a few weeks ago, according to the Washington Post, a judge unsealed documents in a civil suit showing that one of Sandusky’s victims told Paterno about his molestation in 1976, and that the head coach told him he didn’t “want to hear about any of that kind of stuff” because there was a football season to worry about. Sandusky was convicted and is serving 30-60 years in prison. Paterno was fired by Penn State in late 2011 and then died from lung cancer in early 2012.

It was against that backdrop that Penn State rolled out “Joe Paterno Day” at the football stadium Saturday afternoon. And everyone went to their corners of outrage. “Why don’t they call it Protect a Pedophile Day?,” messaged one camp. “Paterno is innocent;” said another, “he is vilified only by those who know nothing.” Some placards said, “We Love You Joe!” Others asked “What About The Victims?”

Lauren Davis, a journalism major and opinion editor for the Daily Collegian, Penn State’s student-run newspaper, incurred brutal alumni wrath with her understated editorial suggesting that, under the circumstances, a Paterno tribute was in bad taste. Emails, according to the New York Times, immediately poured into the school newspaper calling Davis a “clueless, treacherous traitor,” an “idiot” and several other names the Times said it could not print. They were from graduates from the 1970s and earlier, all unloading their venom on a journalism student. The message from one man was, “I hope God can forgive you for your actions, I sure as hell can’t.”

So much anger, so much hate, so much divisiveness. We’ve grown accustomed to it in our political campaigns, now we can’t avoid it at a football game. That’s what happens when we chose to live in a black and white world of heroes and villains. The truth is that Joe Paterno is neither. All of our lives are compendiums of choices, good, bad and in between. If JoePa knew about the molestation and said nothing, he made a terrible choice, but it doesn’t mean he didn’t make other choices that were good, that helped develop and shape his student athletes. It does mean, however, as Lauren Davis, the student editor, wrote, that Penn State should not be honoring this guy, treating him like a saint, particularly with the brutal testimony of the victims still haunting the community. The past is over. Sandusky is in prison. Paterno is dead. Let it be. This is not the time for a party.

Speaking of bad choices, those geezer graduates, who verbally abused a journalism student for spouting wisdom that escaped all of them, have hopefully exhausted their quota for the year. But probably not. Psychologist Eric Simons says his research shows that a sports team is an expression of a fan’s sense of self. He says self-esteem rides on the “outcome of the game and the image of the franchise.” That might explain why a bunch of Nittany Lion alumni in their 60s and 70s are insisting that a dead football coach is blameless. If JoePa covered for a pedophile, it’s a personal wound to them. And we thought football was just a game.

ARMS AND THE TEACHER: READING, WRITING & MARKSMANSHIP

(Caution! Trigger Warning: This post is about firearms in schools. Some passages may seriously agitate, irritate, exasperate or infuriate, particularly If you have the Second Amendment tattooed on your shooting arm, or routinely strap on a Smith and Wesson when stepping out to water the plants. In the interest of your health and my safety, you should probably leave now.)

The Washington Post reported today that Beth Dixon, a 63-year-old teacher at Pennsylvania’s Cumberland Valley Christian School, accidentally left her holstered pistol in a school bathroom, fully loaded and resting on the top of the toilet tank. The facility in question, police told the Post, was a single-unit, unisex restroom, the kind set aside in Virginia and North Carolina for transgender patrons, with or without guns. At Cumberland Christian, this bathroom is also used by elementary school students between the ages of 6 and 8. One of those kids spotted the teacher’s piece on the tank and alerted school authorities. Ms. Dixon quickly reclaimed her weapon and quit her job.

The incident, however, got the school thinking about what kind of a policy it should have on guns in the classroom (and bathroom). It might have been the last school in America without such a policy. The Associated Press reported that Cumberland Christian now wants to ban guns except for those specifically authorized by the administration. All things considered, that’s a pretty progressive gun standard.

The federal Gun-Free Schools Act of 1994, theoretically banned guns from school property, but contained a gaping loophole that was quickly filled by a slew of loopy state legislatures. In effect, if a state lets people carry guns in public, they can carry them right into the schoolhouse. The Washington Post reported two years ago that 20 states have laws expressly permitting licensed adults to bring guns into schools.

In Claude, Texas, there is a sign on the schoolhouse lawn boasting that the faculty is armed. Despite a growing concern over the quality of our schools and lack of sufficient funding, many districts are requiring teachers to take in-service training at shooting ranges. Johnny might not be able to read, but his teacher can hit the bullseye at 50 yards. Sadly, this rush to arm the faculty did not pause for reflection after an Idaho State University instructor accidentally shot himself in the foot during chemistry lab.

On the other side of the bullet, many schools are proudly enforcing a zero tolerance standard when it comes to students and guns. Forget that the teachers are armed to the hilt; these kids have to learn that guns are bad. A seven-year-old boy who brought a water pistol and a Nerf gun to school in Portsmouth, Virginia was suspended for 10 days and is now facing expulsion. A five-year-old girl was suspended from Kindergarten in Brighton, Colorado after she carried her pink Princess Bubble Gun into her classroom. While Texas teachers are packing heat, a seventh grader in suburban Houston was disciplined for wearing a “Star Wars – The Force Awakens” shirt because it depicted a Stormtrooper holding a weapon.” If the Stormtrooper had been a certified teacher, it might have been okay.

This all becomes even crazier at the college level. The carrying of concealed handguns is now legal in Texas higher education classrooms. However, it is a violation of Texas law for a student to possess a dildo or similar sex toy. That duplicity earned the University of Texas in Austin major agitation by returning students this month. Their irresistible campaign theme: “Cocks Not Glocks”. Not quite as poetic as “Make Love, Not War”, but the point is well taken.

This continually escalating domestic arms race is beyond baffling. Guns,, once an instrument of war, crime fighting and food gathering, have evolved into an angry political symbol. All the mass shootings, which now occur with the regularity of a sunrise, bring new calls to arm the populace. If it happens in a school, arm the teachers; if it’s a bar, arm the drinkers, a workplace, arm the workers. It’s like a bizarre science fiction movie. And you just know there won’t be a happy ending.

PUBLIC RESTROOMS: PHONES, NO; TRANS, YES

I’ve had it with cell phones in public restrooms.  I nearly lost control at the urinal the other day when a ringtone version of the Marines’ Hymn started blaring next to me. Frantically searching for his phone, my urinal neighbor’s hands were flailing all over the place at a very inopportune moment, another reminder that men were not built to multitask. Then comes the Busy Executive who commandeers a stall as a second office.  I encountered one recently who sat on the throne, barking commands into his phone and punctuating them with intestinal sounds only a gastroenterologist could appreciate.  The kicker of the month, however, was a young male millennial shooting a selfie in the mirror above a communal sink.  There’s a chance I may have accidentally photobombed him.  If so, it may be my unauthorized debut on Tinder.

This is all so annoying.  Can’t we make public restrooms a cell-phone-free zone?  How about having a separate facility for people with electronic devices?  It will never happen.  It’s just not in the cards.  Instead, there is a full court press to bar Gavin Grimm from using the boys’ bathroom at his high school in Gloucester, VA.  Gavin never caused the slightest restroom disruption.  He just did his business and went back to class, like everyone else.

Yet, there are those in Gloucester who insist that Gavin is not at all like everyone else.  You wouldn’t know that from his pictures in the Washington Post.  He looks pretty much like a central casting version of a high school boy: short curly hair, chubby cheeks, wire rimmed glasses and a slightly bored expression.  All of the commotion is over the fact that Gavin was identified as a girl at birth, an identity that has been forever foreign to him.

According to the Post, Gavin never thought of himself as anything but a boy.  He refused to wear dresses and didn’t understand why he couldn’t join his twin brother on the football field.  He started transitioning in middle school with the full support of his parents who helped him obtain a legal name change.  As a sophomore in 2014, Gavin used the boys’ bathroom at Gloucester High School without incident and with the full blessing of the principal.

Unfortunately, the kid ran smack into the last gasp of a bruised, beaten and frustrated religious right.  Adults who don’t know Gavin have taken out after him with a fevered pitch as part of their campaign against transgender rights.  As a result, he is spending his senior year banned from the boys’ restroom while the U.S. Supreme Court decides which bathroom he can use.

Sadly, we seem incapable in this county of having a meaningful conversation about human rights without inflicting cruel and unusual punishment on the children forced to serve as pawns in a battle they never asked for.  Kids Gavin’s age just want to be who they are; they yearn to fit in and belong.  Unfortunately, the historical path to securing a more just and equitable country is one of making unwitting trailblazers out of youngsters like Gavin.

That’s why many schools looked like war zones in the 1960s. Armed federal troops held back segregationists determined to keep black children from entering all-white schools. Ruby Bridges was all of six when she became the first black student in a New Orleans elementary school.  I was in the fifth grade then and dealing with my own angst of having just transferred to a new school where I didn’t know anybody.  That’s one reason the pictures of little Ruby, school bag in hand, walking up the steps of an all-white school while surrounded by federal marshals, was forever seared into my memory.  I can’t begin to imagine the trauma, the fear, the trepidation she must have felt.  No child should have to face that kind of abuse.  But because Ruby and countless others did, – The Little Rock Nine at Little Rock’s Central High School, Autherine Lucy at the University of Alabama, James Meredith at the University of Mississippi, to name but a few – the Jim Crow notion of “separate but equal” was finally laid to rest.

Or was it?  Gavin Grimm was offered a small, single-user toilet, along with the stigma of being the only student in his school prohibited from using a regular bathroom. Separate, we learned more than 50 years ago, is inherently unequal.  I totally get that the LGBT movement is moving too fast for some people who aren’t gay or transgender.  Folks were just starting to accept the notion that same sex marriage is the law of the land when along came the T’s insisting that they, too are entitled to equal rights under the law. And so, in this volatile summer of 2016, we are fighting over the use of a bathroom, the last stand in the culture wars being waged by those who would like life to go back to the way it was during the days of “Father Knows Best”.

There are those in Gloucester who say it is not natural to change your gender.  Of course, the people in New Orleans who tried to keep Ruby out of the whites-only school said it was not natural for the races to mix.  There are an estimated 1.4 million people in America who identify with a gender that is opposite of their birth sex.  To them, the most unnatural thing in the world is being forced to be something they aren’t.

If your cousin Henry suddenly transitions to Helen, you don’t have to understand everything about her metamorphic journey.  It’s okay not to get it right away; change is hard for everyone.  Yet, you can still accept Helen’s decision on the basis that it is something she needs to do, something that is essential to her well-being, because that’s exactly what it is.  One recent study showed that 41 percent of the transgender population has attempted  suicide, compared to 4.6 percent of the general populace.  This is about so much more than bathroom use.  It’s about each of us having the right to authentically own our identity.  It’s also about supporting people in our lives who had the courage to break away from a gender assignment that never fit.

Just in case the Supreme Court is reading this, I would, without the slightest hesitation, share a men’s room with Gavin Grimm any time, as long as he turns his cell phone off at the door.